by Michael Gill
At the end of a week on the Menlung La, Pugh folded his tents and trekked back to Kathmandu. His findings would emerge as a report to the Medical Research Council during the next few months.
Ed and George cross the Nup La
Deaf to the call of science, or unaware of it, Hillary and Lowe were intent on making the first ascent to the Nup La Pass from Nepal, via an exceptionally difficult-looking icefall at the head of an arm of the Ngojumba Glacier. The previous year, Bourdillon, Murray, Riddiford and Ward had made an attempt while acclimatising on the Everest Reconnaissance but had had neither the time nor the acclimatisation to force a route up the crevassed and unstable masses of broken ice. Once in Tibet, however, the Rongbuk Glacier would be an easy mountain path running past Everest’s North Face, the history of which both men knew well. The threat from the Chinese was almost non-existent. There were said to be soldiers at the Rongbuk Monastery to the north, but they would not be patrolling the desolate, unvisited moraines at the foot of the North Face.
They set out on their three-week excursion on 19 May accompanied by three of their climbing Sherpas and, for the first two days, half a dozen locals including a young Sherpa woman carrying 40 kilograms of potatoes. The route to the foot of the icefall went close to what is now the popular trekkers’ destination of Gokyo, with the south face of Cho Oyu rearing up to the north. Their first sight of the route to the Nup La confirmed that it was not going to be easy: ‘… a great icefall tumbled thousands of feet in a chaos of shattered ice. The icefall was split by a great rock buttress, and the ice surged around it like the bow-wave of a destroyer.’4
There could be no holding back, however. Perhaps this was a test of their resolve and fitness for a Shipton-led Everest expedition next year. For the next eight days they were occupied with finding a route and carrying loads in a chaos of crevasses, collapsing seracs and deep snow. On 29 May they crossed the Nup La in fine weather. The head of the West Rongbuk Glacier swept smooth and unbroken for many miles and they made excellent time. They were moving into Everest history as they moved closer to the North Face, with its First and Second Steps, and the Norton Couloir.
Entering the East Rongbuk, they found a few collapsing rock walls marking the site of the old British Camp 1. Earlier they had expressed a distant interest in attempting unclimbed Changtse, 24,730ft, but it was hardly realistic and dark clouds were gathering to the south and west. It was time to return to the Nup La and down the icefall.
When Ed and George came down, they could feel pleased with themselves. The crossing of the Nup La had been a tour de force, partly sheer exuberance but also a barely disguised demonstration of their strength on snow and ice generally and icefalls in particular.
But this was irrelevant if Everest had already been climbed. Rather than head for Namche, they turned east across the 17,700ft Cho La Pass to the base of Everest where they found the still-warm ashes of a Swiss fire but no human beings. At the grazing village of Phalong Karpa they received the news that seven Swiss had reached the summit, ‘which depressed us a little’, but at Pangboche they met Eric Shipton who told them the Swiss had failed. Ed, deciding that he needed to go to Namche anyway, took off at speed, and in two hours was looking down in the evening light on the ‘hotch potch’ array of a few British tents and the neat lines of the Swiss encampment over which flew their flag.
Ed was invited to coffee and noted in his diary: ‘I was very impressed by René Dittert, the Chef d’Attack, and Lambert, the toeless guide who reached highest on the mountain with the Chief Sherpa Tenzing Bhotia – about 28,100 ft.’5 Dittert remembered Hillary: ‘When I told him of the difficulties almost all of us experienced in freeing ourselves from our professional obligations for four months, he answered with a smile, that it was no problem for him because in New Zealand he had thousands of workers so conscientious that they required no special supervision and worked perfectly well in his absence … “I have lots of bees who do very well without me for a few months.”’6
Ed wrote to his sister June:
The Swiss were a very badly battered and dispirited group even though I think they did very well. It had become quite a national thing with the party and they rather feel they have let Switzerland down in not getting to the top …
On this trip I’ve been lucky in being quite remarkably fit … I am hoping that next year I’ll get a chance to go really high as to date I have found altitude effects relatively negligible. Here’s hoping anyway.7
And to Jim Rose of the NZ Alpine Club in Auckland he wrote: ‘The Swiss are convinced that no one will get to the top of Everest without efficient oxygen …’8
– CHAPTER 13 –
The Swiss get close, 1952
While the British were on the expedition called Cho Oyu, the Swiss were setting foot on the unknown terrain of the Western Cwm, the Lhotse Face and the South Col. There was a first expedition in the warmer pre-monsoon weather of spring 1952, and another in the wintry cold of late autumn. Both were bruising, hard-fought encounters by strong teams of climbers. Two men stood out for their strength at altitude and the way they led and inspired the others. They were Tenzing Norgay and the Swiss guide Raymond Lambert who had gravitated towards each other, sharing a tent and a climbing rope throughout both expeditions.
Tenzing was not a Sherpa but a Tibetan, known in his early days in Darjeeling as Tenzing Bhotia – Tenzing the Tibetan. He was born in Kharta, a mythically remote and lovely valley that lies in the shadow of the Kangshung face of Everest. He was the son of Mingma, a poor yak-herder, and Kinzom, a hardy woman who outlived 12 of her 14 children, eight of them dead before the age of five. When Tenzing was 12, his father entered the Tibetan equivalent of bankruptcy following a disastrous outbreak of disease among his yaks. To ease the family burden, Tenzing crossed the Nangpa La into relatively prosperous Khumbu,1 and became a servant to a well-off family in Thame.2 Socially his status could not have been lower. It was not till many years after Everest that Tenzing was able to overcome his shame at being forced to take any job he could find and admit that he was born a poor Tibetan, not a Sherpa, even though in the eyes of the West, at least, Kharta had an air of myth and romance that Khumbu had partly lost.
He might have been poor, but Tenzing was also attractive and intelligent, with the result that the eldest daughter of his employer’s family, Da Puti, fell in love with him. A penniless Tibetan migrant was not the sort of son-in-law any wealthy, clan-conscious Sherpa was looking for, but Da Puti was not inclined to be obedient. In 1932, when they were both 18, they ran away to Darjeeling, she to live in hardship but with the boy she loved, he to find what work he could, the best paid being as a high-altitude porter on the expeditions. There was not much work to begin with, but in 1935 Tenzing got his break. It came by way of Eric Shipton, who would later do the same for 31-year-old Ed Hillary. Shipton was looking for two more porters for that year’s Everest expedition, and as he cast his eye over the assembled applicants he must have seen something in Tenzing that he liked. He chose him despite his lack of experience.
Tenzing was on Everest with the British in 1935, 1936, and in 1938 Tilman described him as ‘young, keen, strong, and very likeable’.3 Then came the war, which put an end to expeditions. He accepted a job in Chitral as orderly to a Gurkha major, and was joined there by Da Puti and their surviving child, daughter Pem Pem, their son Nima Dorje having died of dysentery. In 1944, Da Puti contracted some lingering disease, perhaps TB, and died at the age of 30, a tragic end to a loving relationship that had survived 12 years of hardship. Needing a wife and a mother for his family, Tenzing married Ang Lhamu. She was four years older, no beauty, but warm, intelligent, resourceful and an excellent stepmother. She was his companion in the years of his ambition to climb Everest and the first few years of fame after it.
After the war, climbing resumed in the Indian Garhwal Himalaya, one of them a Swiss expedition which included René Dittert and André Roch, both of them now members of the 1952 Swiss attempt on Everest. Tenzing had be
come their sardar in 1947 and was outstanding both as a manager of porters and, unusually for a Sherpa at the time, as a climber. So in 1952, Tenzing was invited to be both sardar and a member of the climbing team.
His climbing partner, Raymond Lambert, was at 37 a year younger than Tenzing. He had an exceptional record of difficult climbing in the Alps, including a famous winter ascent of the Aiguilles du Diable, during which he and his companions were holed up for three days in a crevasse and Lambert lost all his toes from frostbite. Along with the other climbers on Everest ’52, he belonged to the Androsace, a club from Geneva limited to 40 elite climbers. Financially the expedition was generously supported by the Swiss Foundation for Alpine Research, whose scientific and geographic interests resembled those of the Royal Geographical Society in London.
The Lhotse Face
The Swiss established their Base Camp at 16,600ft on the Khumbu Glacier on 20 April. Ten days later, they made the difficult crossing of the deep, side-to-side crevasse at the top of the icefall, strung a rope bridge across it, and became the first humans to enter the ice-bound space of the Western Cwm. They called it the Valley of Silence, which was true enough during the cloud-filled afternoons under a blanket of new snow, but less apt when avalanches came thundering off the side walls, or when the deep roar of the jet-stream was heard as it blew its plume of snow off the summit 9000ft above them. The Cwm was a snow corridor rising 3000ft up which they plugged a trail winding from side to side to avoid crevasses. Snow fell most afternoons and maintaining the route was an endless labour. In Geneva the expedition had planned only four camps on the mountain, but everything was bigger and took longer than they had expected, and in the end they placed seven camps.
To a climber grown up in the Alps, the Lhotse Face looked reasonable, a 3500ft cirque of ice and snow that offered two routes. To the right below the summit of Lhotse was the steep but inactive Lhotse Glacier which came down in ledges that could be linked into a winding route with sites for camps. The more direct line to the South Col, which was marked by a sapphire-coloured patch of ice, was a couloir of steep, unbroken snow with a rock spur showing through its upper half. They called it l’Eperon des Genevois, the Geneva Spur. Set at an angle of 40 degrees, the couloir had no camp sites so would have to be climbed in a day. This was the route they chose.
On 15 May, their first big push on the couloir route, they realised how much more difficult the altitude was than they had anticipated, and how cold it was. ‘The wind was sweeping its kingdom,’ wrote expedition leader René Dittert. ‘Its complaint rose from a murmur to a wail and to rending cries. It wore our nerves. Sometimes it raised a shrill note, as sharp as a blade of steel, vibrating like a knife thrown into a wooden target.’
We gained about 300 feet an hour, scarcely more … The snow, which was now harder, obliged us to cut steps. Four, five, six blows with an axe were needed, while lower down two had been sufficient. We were in a bad way … Cutting steps exhausted me and stupefied me. I was empty-headed. I thought only of the moment when I would surrender my place to those who came behind … I leaned my forehead on the axe and waited for my heart to calm down … I watched the rope running up between my legs. It rose slowly, by jerks of eight or twelve inches, and I dreaded the moment when it would tighten again and I would have to start moving once more … Never in the Alps had we reached such a degree of exhaustion.4
They reached a height of 24,600ft, not much more than halfway to the Col, and here they suffered their first setback. The oxygen sets they had brought with them, based on apparatus used in mines, were almost useless.5 They gave some relief at rest but were unworkable during climbing because of the resistance of the valves to the movement of oxygen during the violent breathing at high altitude. It would not be possible to climb the Lhotse Face to the South Col in a single day.
The definitive push from the Cwm to the summit began on 25 May after 10 days fixing ropes and carrying loads to their halfway depot in the Couloir. The schedule was ambitious: day 1 to the Col; day 2 to a high camp at 27,500ft; day 3 the summit. When Lambert, Aubert, Flory, Tenzing and six Sherpas set out, the weather was unusually fine, but after only an hour one of the Sherpas, Ajiba, dropped out with a high fever suggesting a relapse of malaria. There was no option but to send him down and share out his load. By midday they had reached the depot halfway up, and here they added food, fuel, oxygen and tents to their loads. At 4 p.m., with the Couloir now in shadow, two more Sherpas declared they were going back.
‘How could we prevent them?’ wrote Lambert. ‘Had we the right to do so? … Three Sherpas out of seven had gone. For those who continue, such an abandonment is always difficult to bear … we moored what we could not carry; we should have to come back and get it.’
By 7 p.m., with no hope of reaching the Col that night, they scratched out ledges for two one-man tents, and the seven of them crammed inside: ‘Pressed one against the other, we listened to the moaning of the wind. Suddenly the tent flap opened and the indefatigable Tenzing, he who always thinks of others, brought us something to drink. “Merci! Tenzing. Go and sleep”.’6
Tenzing was first awake in the morning, melting snow for hot chocolate. The Sherpas went down to collect supplies from the depot below while the three Swiss and Tenzing resumed the climb. At 10 a.m. the Col was before them, and rising above it the first ever close-up view of the south-east ridge leading to the summit. Had they not been so pitifully weak they might have felt optimistic. Giving his load to the Swiss, Tenzing dropped down to help the three Sherpas lift loads from the depot below.
Lambert describes making camp:
On the Col the wind was violent. There was not a trace of snow: nothing but stones welded together by the frost; a desert in miniature. One would have to be as hard as rock or ice to resist the gusts that had been passing across the Col for millennia and seemed in a rage to prevent us from putting up the two tents. On all fours, clinging to the earth like insects, we at last succeeded in bringing sense to the refractory cloth. It took us two hours, and then came the waiting. It is difficult to imagine what these hours of waiting mean for an expedition in the Himalaya.7
Somehow Tenzing found the energy to make three trips bringing up loads, but the other Sherpas were at the end of their strength. It was clear that they would be in no fit state to carry a high camp, and next day they retreated to the Cwm.
The three Swiss and Tenzing wondered how they should use their remaining strength. They were not strong enough to carry the full weight of a high camp. It was hard to contemplate two carries to the site of a camp on successive days, but what other option was there? Tenzing loaded himself with a tent. They added some food and oxygen, and decided to pitch the tent as high as they could before returning to the Col. The plan was not to stay high overnight, so they carried no sleeping bags and no stove for melting snow.
The weather was fine when they set out at 10 a.m. with the snow in good condition and the climbing easy. The tents below became smaller as they gained height. Late in the afternoon they were at 27,500ft with the weather staying fine. It was Tenzing who made the decision by saying, ‘Sahib, we ought to stay here tonight!’ They pitched their tent and moved in for a long night. Lambert wrote:
We were overtaken by a consuming thirst which we could not appease. There was nothing to drink. An empty tin gave us an idea: a fragment of ice and the candle-flame produced a little luke-warm water. The gusts of wind made our heads whirl; it seemed to us that we took off with them into space, like those houses one thinks one sees moving when watching clouds in flight … this was the boundary between waking and sleeping. I dared not sleep, must not sleep. Tenzing shook me and I awoke, and I shook him in my turn. Amicably we beat one another and pressed close together throughout the night. In the sky the stars were so brilliant that they filled me with fear.8
In the morning they were quickly on their way. They had spent the night fully clothed. They had no liquid and hardly any food. They had three canisters of oxygen and one of their pathet
ically inadequate delivery sets. They began to climb the 1500 feet separating them from the summit but it was painfully slow. Three steps, halt, suck oxygen. They were climbing at just over 100 feet per hour. Their oxygen would last for six hours. By 11 a.m., with their oxygen almost finished, they had less than 1000 feet of height above them, but it might as well have been 10,000 feet. Their bodies were empty of food, fluid, energy, oxygen, hope. Their stops on the descent were as frequent as on the ascent. They had reached their end.
The autumn expedition
A second spring attempt got no higher than the Col but autumn was still available. Only Lambert, Tenzing and expedition leader Chevalley returned for the harsher post-monsoon season. They were joined by four other Swiss climbers and they brought with them two new types of oxygen apparatus, both open-circuit. The better set, made by the German firm Draegar, was based on apparatus used by pilots and had flow rates that could be selected between 2 and 4 L/min. Climbers hoped to use oxygen during both climbing and sleeping above 23,000ft, and for this the expedition was carrying 30,000 litres. With a weight of supplies 50 per cent more than in spring, it was the best equipped expedition to attempt Everest, yet it never had the morale of the spring expedition.
Partly it was the weather passing from autumn into winter. On the march-in, as the huge train of porters was crossing the High Route between Ringmo and Ghat, two thinly clad lowland Nepalis died of exposure. Even before this, Chevalley was writing in his diary, ‘We are becoming morose.’9
The placement of the route up the Khumbu Icefall and the Western Cwm went ahead through October, often in fine weather, though to the sound of wind roaring across the high ridges. The question was which route to take – the spring route direct up the couloir, or the longer winding route up the Lhotse Glacier? Perhaps made confident by their new oxygen, Lambert chose the couloir. On 31 October, two Swiss on oxygen were accompanying 10 Sherpas up the lower couloir when an avalanche of ice fell on them. Several Sherpas were struck and one of them, Mingma Dorje, was left hanging immobile at the end of his rope and bleeding from head wounds. His companions lowered him to Camp 5 but his condition was deteriorating. Chevalley noted widespread subcutaneous emphysema, showing that fractured ribs had punctured his lungs. He died shortly afterwards. The tragedy cast a long shadow; the Sherpas were their friends.
